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The fame of wicked Dodge never interfered with the transaction of business, its iniquity catering largely to the rabble. "I'll take Joel with me," said the drover to Forrest, "and you look after the horses and hang around the hotel. Dud Stoddard is almost sure to look me up, and if you meet him, admit that we looked over his cattle again. I want him to hound me into buying that herd."
Having the cattle prepared for travel, the drover takes the road very slowly for the first two days, not exceeding seven or eight miles a day.
The opposite type, I fancy, would be the soft, dark-haired, blue-eyed men who grow bald sooner than they grow grey, and fat and contented, and die respectably in their beds. His name was Head Walter Head. He was a boss drover on the overland routes.
Once, just before the cattle market, he was sent round by a local laird to announce that any drover found taking the short cut to the hill through the grounds of Muckle Plowy would be prosecuted to the utmost limits of the law. The people were aghast. "Hoots, lads," Snecky said; "dinna fash yoursels. It's juist a haver o' the grieve's."
The drover takes away the cow, an' gies the Cameronian his twanty pund Scots. But after that, he meets him again on the white sands, amang a' the drovers an' dealers o' the land, an' the Gallowayman, he says to the Cameronian, afore a' thae witnesses, 'Come, Master Whiggam, I hae never paid you for yon bit useless cow that I bought.
"You'd better start on Johnny-cakes," said the drover. "The mixture's just the same, but if you make a mess you won't spoil a whole damper. You watch me to-day. You can try your hand to-morrow, if you like." It was still an hour or so before sunrise when the white boys had their first lesson in bush cookery.
He kept to no orderly sequence, but threw them out just as they occurred to him: a rub with bushrangers in the Black Forest, his adventures as a long-distance drover in the Mildura, the trials of a week he had spent in a boiling-down establishment on the Murray: "Where the stink wa so foul, you two, that I vomited like a dog every day!"
Sax caught up with the drover and rode neck and neck with him on the wing of the cattle for some time before the man turned his head. When he did so, he was very surprised. "Hallo, young 'un!" he shouted, almost breathless at the rate they were going. "Can you ride?" "No," bawled Sax exultantly; "but I'm learning." "Well, don't try and learn too much first go," came back the warning.
That was not till the twelfth day of June, and as luck would have it a drover went past that morning taking some cattle to Moffat. He was a man named Hislop, a friend of Turnbull's, and he came in to his breakfast with us and offered to take me with him. I made Turnbull accept five pounds for my lodging, and a hard job I had of it. There never was a more independent being.
"It's the ladino beef that started the stampede on the Brazos made us more trouble than any ten critters of the bunch." "You bought it from the Circle Lazy H," supplemented Billie. Peg-Leg Warren laughed harshly. "O' course they'll swear to it. You're givin' them their job, ain't you?" The drover looked at him steadily.
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